This yahoo video autoplays

[Glenn]

The following Yahoo news story contains a video that autoplays when I open it in Firefox with Noscript running. Yahoo and related sites are generally on my whitelist because I do use their news portal, and sometimes email web interface. But, a number of their news pages start to autoplay when I open them in tabs to read later, and this is extremely annoying, especially when more than one autoplays concurrently. With a bunch (1-50) of tabs open to read later, it can be hard to find the ones that are playing, especially because of the time lag caused by buffering... it isn't usually the one I opened most recently.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/ferguson-re ... 17485.html

Now, my question... how can I stop it? I have media.autoplay.enabled set to false in Firefox. Do I have to disable all scripts in Yahoo to stop this? Or can I be more selective?

[barbaz]

Your link got broken by the board, so I can't see it for myself. To avoid that happening please wrap links in url tags, like this

Code: Select all

[url]link here[/url]

But I'd suggest you start by trying
NoScript Options > Embeddings, check "Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too"

[therube]

http://news.yahoo.com/video/ferguson-re ... 17485.html
(The link works "as is", as Yahoo "auto-corrects" it .)

Click-to-play doesn't do it (anymore, since change on FF end).
NoScript doesn't do it, at least by default, even with 'Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too' (& with Flash blocked).

Not sure offhand if (or even how) Flashblock works (or does it, now)?
Or are there some NoScript prefs to bring back old FF-like behavior where you would have to click each blocked item individually before playback would start?

FF, by default, only restores tabs as needed when opening from Session Restore, so possibility exists that only one, perhaps, clip would fire on startup, but that doesn't apply to tabs opened as described by the OP, so having them auto-play sucks.

[glenn]

Here's the URL, done right. First time user, hadn't noticed that the forum was on a site I hadn't approved in NoScript... so when I click URL nothing happened, and I didn't realize why... NoScript.info was permitted. http://news.yahoo.com/video/ferguson-re ... 17485.html

Thanks for the responses. As therube points out, the suggestion doesn't help.

[Glenn]

I should point out, that the suggestion does change the behavior... it prevents the autoplay, but then also prevents playing the video at all, even when I get to the page and click on the video area, etc. No obvious solution to that, so that's why I said it doesn't help.

[barbaz]

No obvious solution to that,

NoScript Menu > Blocked Objects, pick one of the choices below the last separator?

[Giorgio Maone]

Please check latest development build 2.6.9.19rc1.

[barbaz]

@Giorgio: For future reference, what was the bug?

[Giorgio Maone]

@Giorgio: For future reference, what was the bug?

No bug.
I just added special work-around code to cope with Yahoo creating an unique "YUIBridgeCallback" Flash variable for its player every time the page is reloaded (hence causing activation to never work, because the embedding was always a different one to NoScript), by replacing it with an artificial unique movie identifier extrapolated from the page's URL.

[barbaz]

Thanks for the explanation.

[Glenn]

Would like to try the development build, but I repeatedly get a connection failure trying to download it.

[barbaz]

I can connect to secure.informaction.com fine. Temporary glitch?

Anyway one or the other of these links should work:
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/noscript/versions/
https://noscript.net/feed?t=b

[Glenn]

It finally occurred to me to download the development version and drag it in to FF, which got it installed. Clicking for automatic install consistently failed with a connection failure to noscript.net, _after_ the download happened.

Having installed the development version, the video still autoplays. Then I tried the workaround suggested of blocking even for trusted sites, and again that prevents the autoplay from happening.

The first time I tried the blocking for trusted sites, I still seemed to be prevented from viewing at all... but on subsequent reload it worked. So that seemed somewhat useless in that there is little point to opening a tab in the background if you have to reload it when you get to the foreground if you want to watch the video. Of course, it is helpful if the surrounding page convinces you that the video is not worth watching.

On the other hand, closing that tab and and then reloading it in the background again, I got the red-circled-f overlay immediately and didn't have to reload. So I'm not sure what will happen in future cases. Yet.

[Glenn]

Restarting FF, and trying the same video as a background tab again, I again found the need to reload the page before I could get it to play. So, this is an improvement, and I've no clue if it can be improved further, but there is further room for improvement.